Reaching for Higher Ground

The UNI John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center is pleased to present the UNI Entrepreneurship Symposium. The event is open to the public and is free. No reservations required. This year's speaker is Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com, an internet news aggregator. He is also the author of It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News (2007). He recently announced his candidacy for governor of Kentucky.

The Reaching for Higher Ground Film & Discussion Series explores topics related to the 2014-15 RHG theme Media and Social Media: A Networked Society.

This evening Miss Representation will be screened and serve as the basis for personal reflection and dialogue: “Like drawing back a curtain to let bright light stream in, Miss Representation uncovers a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see. Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the film exposes how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful herself.”

The RHG Film & Discussion Series is co-sponsored by the UNI Center for Multicultural Education and UNI Rod Library. All series events are free and open to the public.

FORTEPAN IOWA, a public digital photo archive of Iowa's history developed at the University of Northern Iowa, is the first of its kind in Iowa and the United States, and is unique in that it features curated photos taken by ordinary Iowans over the twentieth century.

Because the photographs of FORTEPAN IOWA will be available for free public download and carry a Creative Commons license, the open-source platform will inspire visitors to engage digitally with the high-quality images—a rare opportunity in a heavily copyrighted age, and a significant contribution to the digital humanities, history education and digital literacy. Unlike other photo archives that arrange images according to collection donor or subject matter, the FORTEPAN interface conveys history chronologically, so it will be easily searchable. The project has been funded in part by a UNI Capacity Building grant and a Humanities Iowa grant.

The online collection is called FORTEPAN IOWA because it is the first international sister site to the Hungarian FORTEPAN project, founded by Miklós Tamási and András Szepessy in 2009. Bettina Fabos, associate professor of visual communication in the Dept. of Communication Studies, first developed the idea for the project after meeting with FORTEPAN directors in Hungary during her Fulbright fellowship. The name FORTEPAN comes from the name of a well-known Hungarian photographic film that was made from 1922 to 2007. Fabos; Leisl Carr Childers, history dept.; Sergey Golitsynskiy, communication studies; and Noah Doely, art department, are among the UNI faculty working on this project. Those same faculty members are currently working on a NEH Digital Humanities Implementation Grant for the project.

FORTEPAN IOWA is based on the Hungarian FORTEPAN project and will display thousands of photographs along a sliding interactive timeline and invite visitors to horizontally scroll through highly curated, well-documented photographs digitized at tremendously high resolution.

FORTEPAN IOWA will launch with at least 2,000 photos in the archive. Many of these have been obtained with the assistance of students in UNI's Interactive Digital Studies program. The photos represent the broad span of the twentieth century, and contain images of everyday life from across Iowa: recreation, family gatherings, fairs and festivals, political events, agricultural activities, business and innovation (e.g., the archive has extraordinary photos of the earliest John Deere facilities), education and much more. The archive avoids the typical "great men" version of history, and instead presents Iowa history democratically, from a grassroots perspective.

András Török, managing director of Summa Artium and a representative of the original FORTEPAN project in Budapest, Hungary, will visit and speak at the launch event.

"Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption" by Laura Briggs

"Somebody’s Children" examines the growth of transracial and transnational adoption in the United states since 1945 and challenges dominant understanding of these practices. Briggs suggests that the popular narrative of abandoned or orphaned children being rescued by predominantly white, middle–class Americans is problematic, representing a cultural fantasy rather than reality.

Media and social media portray and depict carefully crafted messaging and messages to America’s youth on what it means to be a woman or a man. What social norms and thresholds of behaviors distinguish when a girl or woman is considered “hot” and “desirable” as opposed to a “slut” or “whore?” To what extent are boys and men held to similar standards of behavior – or are they?

The Reaching for Higher Ground Film & Discussion Series explores topics related to the 2014-15 RHG theme Media and Social Media: A Networked Society.

This evening Panopticon: The Documentary about your Privacy will be screened and serve as the basis for personal reflection and dialogue: “As technology advances our privacy is disappearing. This documentary, Panopticon, explores just how much our personal lives are being affected by the usage of invasive technology to monitor us. The film was made in Holland and uses local examples such as their train system. The Rotterdam tram, face recognition cameras scan passengers before they can board. The purpose is to identify “unwanted” passengers but most people boarding the trolleys are completely unaware of that this invasive system not only exists but can even record your conversations. Other Dutch examples include: highways lined with cameras as part of the Automatic Number Plate Recognition. Then there’s Deep Packet Inspection that analyzes electronic traffic, and keeps tabs of your Internet activity.“

The RHG Film & Discussion Series is co-sponsored by the UNI Center for Multicultural Education and UNI Rod Library. All series events are free and open to the public.